With a Touch of Nostalgia, MiDesktop Brings KDE 1 Back to Life

Those of you who remember the fledgling of the Linux desktop will probably smile with a hint of nostalgia as you read this news. It takes us back more than 25 years, thanks to MIDesktop, a modern fork of KDE 1, which just released its first public development preview, bringing the late-1990s KDE desktop experience back to life on current Linux systems.

Previously known as MiDE, the project is a fork of KDE 1 that has been ported to the Osiris toolkit, itself derived from Qt 2, and adapted to run on modern Linux distributions. According to the project’s lead dev, the goal is not to recreate KDE visually alone, but to preserve its original design philosophy: speed, simplicity, and a distraction-free desktop.

If you decide to give it a try, packages are now available for Debian 13 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, allowing users to install and run the classic KDE 1 environment without the extensive manual work historically required to make such legacy software function on modern systems. The result is a lightweight desktop that remains responsive even on modest hardware, and looks like this.